Subjects

Abstract

The study aims to profoundly examine how the public administrators’ attitudes towards citizen participation (CP) could affect their decision on the implementation of a meaningful CP that would reciprocally impact on the public trust level, policy outcomes, and government performance. The research seeks to understand what the extent the officials are willing to utilize CP practices in their decision-making process, to improve citizens’ trust in governments and to help to achieve better performance. The research presented a case study exercising long-term CP projects operated by a water resource agency in Taiwan to provide evidence that the officials’ attitudes toward CP could steer the CP quality to outcomes that could help improve public trust then accordingly achieve the policy goals. The conceptual framework combining both normative and instrumental approaches could contribute to the studies of administrative “meaningful CP” exercises. The case study utilized narrative methodology through interviews to seek informative and in-depth explanations from 31 participants to examine the propositions of this research. The research combined two strategies to analyze the data, providing extensive but necessarily selective quotations of the data for presenting the essential flavor to the readers, as well as the report results in a relatively categorized outline. The study presented a comprehensive analysis through various techniques including the researcher’s involvement in the case project, direct observation, interviews, and logic model. The ultimate intent of the study is to generate data primarily through interviewing both public servants and civic representatives regarding the impacts of the officials’ attitude toward CP on the improvement of the level of public trust, public policy decision-making, accountability, and performance. The study aims to provide the explanatory findings to further understand the attitude and thoughts of the administrators, as the forerunner of the CP decision and activities that could affect the administrative decision of including citizens in the policy-making process. Nevertheless, the major practical contribution of the research is that it provided much needed empirical narrative data showing the causal relationship between public servants’ attitude and an actual CP project through qualitative research that has not been examined from the past studies. The research does not intend to conclude a generalized result but to provide an analytic generalization through the deepened explanation of administrative perspectives toward CP.